I'm a board member of Open UK - which promotes UK leadership in open technology - and we're looking for nominations for our Open Source Awards. These are designed to honour the individuals and projects which have made a positive impact to open source, open data, and open hardware. You can nominate at openuk.uk/nominations/ There are five categories available: 👶 Young Person 👩 Individual 📊 Open Data – company, organisation or project 🖥 Open Hardware – company, organisation or project 💻 Open …
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All printers are objectively awful. But this might be the cutest little printer I've ever used! This is the Phomemo M02 Pro. If you remember the late, lamented Little Printer you'll immediately understand the appeal. Connect your phone to it, and immediately print out text, graphics, drawings, rules, Tweets, the weather, ANYTHING! It uses thermal paper, so there's no ink to run out and no expensive refills. Phomemo sell their own paper in a range of colours and styles - but it looks like it …
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I made a laptop sticker. Enough people told me how much they liked it, that I decided to sell them. Here's the story of how I (didn't) become a millionaire. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Single-Blinking-Laptop-Sticker.mp4 Prototype Normally, I'd upload a design to something like RedBubble, and sell the stickers that way. But I couldn't find any sticker companies which sold lenticulars. So, I had to do the ordering, processing, and posting myself. Lots of admin. Joy. …
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I think what I'm asking for is impossible... I have a Linux laptop with built in speakers and an external monitor with speakers. The laptop connects to the screen via HDMI. I have my Linux desktop set up for dual screens. If I drag a window from one screen to the other, I want the sound to follow the window. Is this possible? A bit more detail When I have YouTube running on my monitor, I want the sound to come from the monitor. When I have a video conference running on my laptop screen,…
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A practical book for practitioners and non-practitioners alike interested in better service delivery, this book is the definitive new guide to designing services that work for users. My former colleague Lou has written a marvellous book. It reminds me of the great “Simplicity” by Edward de Bono – it’s a series of short chapters, interspersed with large-print summaries. I regard it as essential to anyone involved in service design. Or anyone on the periphery of services. It clearly and calmly …
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I've spent most of the last decade ranting against NFC. QR Codes are almost always superior to NFC. QR codes hold more data, are extremely cheap, and easy to spot. NFC tags are limited in size, expensive, and have no universally recognised icon. Oh, and NFC doesn't work if it's stuck on a metal surface! So, I've been sent 20 NTAG 215s to review. First thing's first, these cost a pound each! The 215s are in a supply shortage at the moment, but even buying in bulk, you'll only get down to…
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This Tweet went unexpectedly viral! Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentNew blog post!I've built a physical <blink> tag!shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/05/b…Please forgive me 😁 pic.x.com/a7bjpxmbfj❤️ 785💬 44🔁 011:24 - Thu 21 May 2020 Buy them! So I bought 200 of them for use as laptop stickers. I have an understanding wife. After some feedback from the sticker experts at TwenT3 - I redesigned them to be green text on a black background. https://shkspr…
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For a blog called "shkspr.mobi", I don't blog enough about Shakespeare. Sorry! The brilliant thing about Shakespeare is its versatility. You can do almost anything with it. Mess around with genders, set it in space, make a puppet show. It all just works. Perhaps you've seen a gender-flipped version of one of the minor history plays set in Wales against the Miners' Strike and it was proper theatre. Or maybe you only ever watch all-male casts from the groundlings to see what it was really…
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If you have the Akismet spam plugin for WordPress, you'll be familiar with this problem. When your mouse pointer goes over any URL, you get a large website preview taking over parts of your screen. I asked for a way to turn this off and I'm happy to say the developers listened! Sadly, there's no tickbox option, only a WordPress filter so you'll have to add the following scrap of code to your theme's functions.php file. function disable_akismet_mshots( $value ) { return false; }…
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Back in November 2017, I treated myself to my first new phone in ages - the OnePlus 5T. I was pretty excited! This week, 928 days after I bought it, OnePlus pushed an upgrade to Android 10! Back in 2011, I was moaning that Sony Ericsson didn't even support their phones for a year. How times have changed! Android devices aren't yet at the longevity of the iPhone, and they're still a long way away from Linux's ability to run modern software on ancient systems. But this is a positive step. …
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My friend Owen recommended this book - and as it was only 99p, I thought I'd give it a go. It's a sprawling urban fantasy - with an unwieldy cast of characters. It is suffused with atmosphere, palace intrigue, and a strong sense of decay and decrepitude. I'm usually a sucker "history + magic" books - but this was a bit unrelenting, and almost devoid of joy. It has an unsatisfying end - like lots of cheap Amazon books, it is sequel-bait. Slightly frustrating. An entertaining enough read,…
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I am not a fashion blogger. The last time I did anything interesting to my hair, I did not enjoy it. But lockdown has meant my beard hasn't been shorn in three months. So when I was offered a beard styling product to review, how could I refuse?! It's around £16 on Amazon. I've no idea whether that's a reasonable price or not. There are two heat settings, a poorly translated user manual, and a UK plug - sadly not USB-C. It gets plenty warm which, if it were winter, would be deeply pleasant. …
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